Spiked Boots: Sketches of the North Country

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Summary: Spiked Boots-Building Character in Northern New England
Review: As a song reminds us, "Everything old is new again." Certainly the reissue of Spiked Boots, the classic anecdotal history of New England loggers, is a case in point. Robert Pike's colorful chronicle of early 20th century loggers and their world is a salutary reminder that history is not just charts, graphs, demographics, and footnotes, but is also portraits of unique individuals living and working in vanished environments.

The new edition contains rare, never before published photographs, and an insightful forward by the author's daughter - herself a journalist/historian - providing a portrait of the author - a complex, unique New England personality, as fascinating as any he chronicled.

Anyone interested in recalling or capturing fast disappearing regional history would do well to discover this remarkable example. Robert Pike served his fortunate subjects well. His book is a model for recording regional characteristics before they are lost forever.

B. Tomlinson, Ph.D. Princeton, NJ

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Summary: "Spiked Boots" is Classic Americana
Review: I strongly recommend Spiked Boots. Now I know why it is considered a Yankee Classic. It is a yarn of the highest calibre, written by a man, Robert E. Pike, who was as fascinating a personality as the characters he wrote about. As I turned the pages, I met men with colorful names like Jigger Johnson and Dan Boss; real people who had worked hard and lived hard in the North Country so long ago. These characters even had their own language, tossing out words like besom, cant dog, wanigan and draw-tub. This new edition has a well-crafted heartwarming preface written by Robert Pike's daughter, author Helen Pike. Through her words, I learned even more about the man who penned this classic, and his fascination with the lost art of logging.

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Summary: North Country Tales at their finest
Review: Robert Pike's <i> Spiked Boots<i> is a rare sort of history book, one that a reader loves to come across in the arid sea of historical work out that chokes the shelves of book stores. Presented as a series of vignettes on subjects ranging from haunted hunting camps to Ginseng Willard and his homemade coffin, Pike provides an important insight into the history and society of the northern reaches of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. It is a presentation of a world that is now gone, pushed through the chutes in the style of the great logging rushes that Old Vern, the cagey ex walking boss and Pike's guide through this world, once worked. The presentation of this world is not of a Hesiodic Golden Age, when men were men and trees were more plentiful. It is a presentation of a world where some men worked hard, some women harder, and some not at all. It is a memoir of hard working lumbermen and guides -- how they worked, how they played, and for some of them, the mistakes that they made that took their lives. Pike was a fortunate man to have encountered Vern, for the history that was handed to him is beyond value as a vision into a bygone age and an area that is sometimes forgotten. And the characters are unforgetable also.

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Summary: North Country Tales at their finest
Review: Robert Pike's Spiked Boots is a rare sort of history book, one that a reader loves to come across in the arid sea of historical work out that chokes the shelves of book stores. Presented as a series of vignettes on subjects ranging from haunted hunting camps to Ginseng Willard and his homemade coffin, Pike provides an important insight into the history and society of the northern reaches of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. It is a presentation of a world that is now gone, pushed through the chutes in the style of the great logging rushes that Old Vern, the cagey ex walking boss and Pike's guide through this world, once worked. The presentation of this world is not of a Hesiodic Golden Age, when men were men and trees were more plentiful. It is a presentation of a world where some men worked hard, some women harder, and some not at all. It is a memoir of hard working lumbermen and guides -- how they worked, how they played, and for some of them, the mistakes that they made that took their lives. Pike was a fortunate man to have encountered Vern, for the history that was handed to him is beyond value as a vision into a bygone age and an area that is sometimes forgotten. And the characters are unforgetable also.

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Summary: Spiked Boots
Review: Spike Boots chronicles not only a history of the Connecticut River Valley that is gone and forgotten by all but Pike's characters who plied the river on their log rafts, it also documents and preserves the arduous and danger-filled adventure that was their lives. This is a good book, written with insight and verve. And it is especially good for those of us who know the landscape, the people, and who have tested the river in spring.

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Summary: Want to be taken to another time and place?
Review: Spiked Boots is among a rare breed of books, either fiction or fact, that can take the reader directly into the minds of the characters and places the author is talking about. Robert Pike approaches the tales of Vern Davison, Jack Haley, and a host of others with such clarity you are transported directly back 100 years to the logging industry of the "north country." You sit in your chair reading the book and the words slowly turn into the wind rushing by your face as you are transported into the horse drawn carriage with Vern Davison and Robert Pike, and you find yourself slowly engulfed in another era.

Not to be overlooked in the new Countryman Press edition is the foreword added by Helen-Chantal Pike, Robert Pike's daughter. The foreword adds a look into Robert Pike's life that only a daughter could bring into the book, from the tales of the original "peddling" trips, to the meaning of his writings to himself, to the intimate detail of Robert Pike reading a well worn copy of Spiked Boots over and over again during his last years of life.

Also added to the new edition are several photographs culled from the Pike Archives featuring a rare photographic glimpse of the scenery and people that the tales of Spiked Boots originates from. One can fully appreciate the men spoken of as they gaze at the picture of Ginseng Willard next to the coffin he slept in for two years to, "get used to it."

For fans of America, for fans of history, for fans of self-reliance, the new edition of Robert E. Pike's Spiked Boots is not one to be missing from the shelves of the library. It offers a rare glimpse at a by-gone era, of men and women that no longer exist in this form of ruggedness that made America what it is today.

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Summary: Spiked Boots-Building Character in Northern New England
Review: This book is aptly titled as it concerns those hard-working, hard-living souls who were all but born wearing spiked boots and is a continuing saga of this section of New England known as the "north country". These true accounts of activity in the wood and lumber industry are well detailed from early in the 1800's until the last drive in 1915. Interspersed in these narrations are related stories of heroic deeds, impossible feats of skill, strength and daring; folk lore, superstition and camp fire tales all of which are skillfully described by Pike. These are so well presented that at times it is not easy to separate fact from fiction. Only after years of traveling in the north country, re-living the camp life and winning the confidence and respect of the woodsman was Robert Pike able to put together this story of a by-gone era. He tells it in true vernacular-a peavey is a peavey that was the the everyday tool of the woodsman. The bridal chain was the brake that held back the sled load of logs going down the mountain. His description of the lumber baron-good or not so good- is true to life. No artist could paint a better picture of those spiked boots living in that ice water for days, and weeks, on end. Hardy souls that respected their fellow workers is the tribute describing the strong men of the north country. Spiked Boots is one segment of our culture worth knowing and re-reading.